The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (190721).Volume IV. Prose and Poetry: Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton.

XVIII. The Book-Trade, 15571625.

§ 7. The Beginnings of a Business.

To embark on his career as a bookseller and publisher was a simpler, if more hazardous, undertaking. If possessed of means, the young bookseller might purchase a stock of saleable books, and at once open a shop in some busy thoroughfare or take up a point of vantage in one of the stalls or booths which crowded round the walls of St. Pauls, and there expose his wares for sale. But, supposing him to have nothing save his native wit to aid him, there was still a way by which he could set up for himself. If he could procure the copy of some book, or pamphlet, or, may be, even a ballad, which he could enter in the register as his property, and then get printed by some friendly printer, he would have made a modest beginning; and, if this first essay happened to promise a fair sale, he might, by exchanging copies of it with other publishers for their books, at once obtain a stock in trade. This system of interchange seems to have been a common practice, and books were sometimes entered in the register with the proviso that the stationer shall not refuse to exchange these bookes with the company for other good wares. The custom continued in vogue throughout the seventeenth century, and it was in this way that, in 1681, the celebrated John Dunton began his career as a publisher; having ventured to print Doolittles Sufferings of Christ, he says, by exchanging it through the whole trade, it furnished my shop with all sorts of books saleable at that time.